Lost in Suburbia: The evolution of being naked

Wednesday

Aug 29, 2012 at 12:01 AMAug 29, 2012 at 10:22 AM

When your kids are babies, they have absolutely no concept of you being naked. They have bigger fish to fry, such as eating, sleeping and pooping. But sometime around age 2, they suddenly get what naked it is, and then the naked questions come out.

Tracy Beckerman

When your kids are babies, they have absolutely no concept of you being naked.

They have bigger fish to fry, such as eating, sleeping and pooping. But sometime around age 2, they suddenly get what naked it is, and then the naked questions come out.

“Mommy, where is your penis?” asked my son the first time he saw me naked and actually realized I was, in fact, naked.

When I admitted that I don’t have one, he wondered if I had lost it or if it had just wandered off. This seemed like a good time to explain the differences between girls and boys. It also seemed like a good time to stop being naked around my son.

Of course, he had no problem with his nakedness, and he and his sister would run around sans clothes whenever they had the opportunity.

This was the beginning of what we came to know as the "funny naked stage." The kids figured anything that you could do with clothes on was much funnier when you did it naked. This included answering the front door, getting the mail out of the mailbox and walking the dog. Not that we let anyone actually do that last one, because, you know, it would have embarrassed the dog.

Funny naked lasted for several years. And then, just like when Eve bit into the apple and realized she and Adam were wandering around Eden without so much as catcher’s mitt to cover their private parts, my kids suddenly decided that being naked wasn’t funny anymore. Oddly enough, this was still years before they had anything to hide. Yet, at some point, a naked clock went off in their heads that said, “Time to cover up,” and naked went away. Except for butts. Butts were still funny. Especially when they belonged to other people.

As we entered the teenage years, though, even the butts got put away, and then only butt cracks were funny. We were down to just a tiny little line between two cheeks. It was truly the end of naked.

I was a little sad for the end of naked. It was a milestone… the transition from childhood to adulthood. I realized that there wouldn’t be another little naked body running through my house until I became a grandmother one day. Not that I wasn’t enjoying the new place we were in with our teens, but I still mourned the end of the innocence, sweetness and joyful nakedness of my children’s childhood.

Then, one day, someone got an accidental glimpse of me naked. This is when I realized that we had indeed left the Funny naked stage and had entered the Gross naked stage.

“EWWWWW!” bellowed my daughter, slamming the bathroom door shut closed after she had walked in on me getting out of the shower. “You’re naked!”

“Yeah, you kind of have to be naked for the shower to be effective, you know?” I responded through the door.